The old drive base worked well but being made from the steel of a discarded bed frame made it very heavy. I decided to build a new frame from aluminum. This shed a lot of weight and improved K-9's handling by removing a heavy battery from directly over the front casters.

I had an incident at a convention where the poor access to the batteries nearly caused a fire. I knew I wanted easier access to the batteries so I designed the electronics tray to lift up.